Sorry, guys – please note the complete absence of the ‘&’ between the letters. Better luck next time! 🙂

Experimenting around over the last week about what’s the best way to track social media, as an individual. Had an epiphany a little while back when I had 10+ tabs open, on 4 browsers, different sessions for different IDs on assorted social networks… and realized I’m going to need more. That’s just ridiculous.

Most of my activity on social networks and platforms consists of watching – so I started exploring what are the ways in which I can do this more efficiently, and finally, settled on a combination of Feedburner and Google Reader. Almost any dynamic content on the web can be converted to a feed, and Reader, while taking a little getting used to, is pretty good at organizing these. I initially thought it’ll just be a tool to collate updates, but it’s turning out to be more – by a simple process of narrowing down to specific sections in a site and creating feeds of those, you’re eliminating the need for the browsing through each one separately. Some of the good sites have been very intuitive with this, enabling feeds at just the right places (LinkedIn Q&A is a case in point.) The end result is actually redefining my browsing behavior.

Even my own content is easier to manage – I have 5 blogs, not to mention assorted other output in terms of photo uploads, tweets, video, etc. There were multiple blogrolls, subscriptions, follows, lists and favorites scattered through each of these. Now I can at least get it all in one place. It also leaves me free to block a lot of unnecessary updates on FB & Twitter, restoring some sanity to my timeline.

Make sure you go through your sharing settings on Reader once and understand them – a lot of what you watch you may not want to broadcast.

I realize this probably sounds very old hat – a lot of you will have been using Reader for years now – but in terms of the current issues over privacy, time lost in social media, information overload and drowning in a deluge of infojunk, if you haven’t used Reader till now, give it a shot. I really don’t see myself discarding this anytime soon.